Gamebryo Interview

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By Robert 'Apache' Howarth

Beyond3D tossed up a twopart special with Emergent Technologies about its Gamebryo engine, which powers the likes of Oblivion, Warhammer Online and probably Fallout 3. Here's a snip from the interview portion of the articles:

HDR: In Oblivion, this is done via a FP16 frame buffer as far as we can see - any specific trick people might not know about? With DX10 cards coming and supporting more exotic formats such as RGBE and FP10, are you excited about those? Do you think they'll improve visual quality, or at least performance?

DA: Sorry, we can't comment directly on our clients' work. But I can say that we are very excited about D3D10. Our lead DirectX rendering engineer, Tim Preston, is hard at work developing a Gamebryo renderer utilizing D3D10, and we plan on showing this renderer at GDC The design for the renderer includes support for the new D3D10 formats. We hope to use these new formats to improve both performance and quality. Beyond that, we aren't prepared to say anything specific about what we're doing with these formats.

We've certainly seen improvements on other platforms. For example, Xbox 360 has a 32-bit format that stores a condensed floating point representation of color. We were able to convert rendering paths to use this specialized format as opposed to a standard FP16 format. This conversion resulted in a virtually identical image using half of the bandwidth and provided an excellent boost to our frame rates.